Exhausted+Tired+Confused=Reformation!

Hello there, probably some of you do know me, I am Aiden, a proud partner & contributor of Ruhaizad. I am a freelance tourist guide in my own hometown, the city of Kota Kinabalu, Sabah.

Over the past 1 month, I have been dealing with most of our website visitors’ accommodation reservations, bookings and acquiring. At the first month of dealing with those accommodations (December 06′ – January 07′) , I remembered that those days were a chaos for both of us. We handled our visitors’ requests disorderly, and often took several days to get to know what our visitors were requesting actually.

Due to the heaps requests from our online visitors, I have figured out a way, to centralize our visitors’ requests, rather than having those visitors to send a request to Ruhaizad’s comment-form page, and then having Ruhaizad personally re-send all request email to me, and then proceed with asking what do those visitors really want us to help them. After a several hours of discussing with Ruhaizad, we eventually came out with a solution, a request form which every one of our visitors can easily describe what they want.

As the time goes on, it has been about 2 months that we have been dealing with the accommodations’ activities. Every single day, we will receive at least 1 to 2 requests for the Mount Kinabalu’s accommodation. And we noticed that if we do not systematically manage the request form, both of us will be the one who are going to be exhausted. And that is what I am feeling exactly right now.

Therefore, to prevent this from happening again, we (me and Ruhaizad) has actually review our website, and the main core of setting up the website. We both found out some part of our current situation which need to be optimized.

1) Before this, we are helping off almost all of our online visitors for FREE . — We do have our own life too, we are doing a favour to our online visitors, which are, to help them to search for accommodations in the Mount Kinabalu area. Many times, some of our visitors just don’t understand our situation, they thought that we have a company, and we are operating as an operator. Some of them even rush us on a daily or bi-daily basis. The answer is NO. We are only ordinary human like all of you, which by profession, Ruhaizad practices as a doctor, and I am a freelance tourist guide in Kota Kinabalu. After reviewing from this aspect, we have decided to generate some profit by doing so. After all, Ruhaizad has his own family, while I need to focus on my own career too.

2) We are going to put our business ONLINE. — That means we are going to have a more convenient way for online visitors from worldwide to pay via the internet, on a secured page. In that case, I truly appreciate those who have been dealing with us in the past 2 months. I know that we have had a hard time for those payments being made, but I sincerely thank all of those who had been dealing with us, for your trust on us, even by paying us using various kind of method, such as Paypal, Moneybookers, bank transfer, and so on. You/your friend are going to have a lot more choices in the near future, which we are recently trying hard to set up some.

3) We are still having a messy system to cater the accommodations’ request. — We will try our best to give the best information for our online visitors. We will let them choose their own way to plan out their trip in Sabah [ either to go on with a budgeted tour, a normal tour, a tailor-made tour, or a third-party (local tour operator in Kota Kinabalu) offered package tour ] .

Hopefully by the end of March, most of our plan will be successfully generated, and thus making a better way for our online visitors to book for the accommodations. In my humble opinion, every single form of business/organization/groups/non-profit organization will have hard times on their initial formation. Same thing happened to us, as we started with limited manpower. During our optimization of our website & company (will set up one in a short while) in the near future, we will be operating the request form at a slower rate comparing to those days (back to 1 or 2 months ago). Hope all of you can understand about our situation, and every single contribution of any form, which come from any of our previous/recent/future online visitors will be a grateful thing for both me and Ruhaizad.

Hopefully this post will lead a clearer view for some of our online visitors. Again, I sincerely thank those who have supported us in the past, and those who are giving great support to us in the future too.

1 thought on “Exhausted+Tired+Confused=Reformation!”

My name is Eugene and I am from Singapore. I hope you guys can help me…i really need it.

I filled in the form, but decided to do this as I am in a desperate situation.
I have 5 members and we foolishly booked the airtic to arrive in KK on Sat 10 Mar at 10am with the hope of climbing Mount K on Sunday 11 Mar.

I know. Its bloody stupid. I called Sutera and I cannot secure Laban Rata accomodation (park accom is available). Tried BorneoEcoTours and KK also. But both no availability.

I’ve heard and read from other blogs that walk-in bookings to Sutera are possible even when they say it is full (via phone). Alternatively as I read on your website, some agencies also pre-book. So I’m hoping you guys can help me as a middleman.

I understand the need to charge…it is afterall a value service. So do quote me…and due to our last minute of foolishness…I’m sure you will find us most willing to pay. (just don’t quote us an arm or a leg! hee!)